The approaches described in this section could be pursued but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A wide variety of methods are used for asking questions and surveying groups of individuals, friends and communities. Many individuals poll their friends on a daily basis, and those polls have a direct impact on the decisions they make. On a larger scale, marketing research often utilizes surveys of individuals to obtain information about the marketplace. These polls and surveys have traditionally been done either verbally or through the mail. Although, with the rise in networking technology, many individuals and researchers have taken to email or other social network applications to ask their questions. However, email and current social network applications suffer from difficulties in collecting and analyzing survey data in real time, and providing for intuitive ways to poll and interact with various media content. Although various solutions have been proposed, none effectively enable the intimate communication of a messaging system with the scalability of a social network.